One of the great Office 365 advantages is that we can use many of the features and functions we already know from our OnPremises background since all of them are available in the Microsoft productivity platform. In this article I will show you how we can use Office 365 Security Groups in SharePoint Online in the same way we can use Active Directory Security Groups in SharePoint OnPremise. In order to use Office 365 Security Groups in SharePoint Online you have to follow the steps bellow:
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Navigate to the Office 365 Administration Portal (https://portal.office.com/default.aspx) and do clic in the Groups link in the vertical menu. In the Groups page, you will see a list of all the existing Security Groups (including the ones related to the Office 365 Groups) and you can also add new ones.
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Press the “+” button to create a new Office 365 Security Group. In the window that is displayed, you have to specify the name and description for the Office 365 Security Group.
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Once you press the “Create” button, the new Office 365 Security Group is created and a new window is displayed. From here you can add members to the Group through the “Edit members” link.
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In the “Group members” you can see all the current Group members or add new ones.
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Once you have added new members to the Group, you will see them in the members list.
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In order to use the new Office 365 Security Group in a SharePoint Online Site, just navigate to the site where you want to use and click the “SHARE” link in the top navigation bar. In the “Share” dialog, just type the name of the Office 365 Security Group and assign it to an existing SharePoint Security Group or directly to a Permission level. In this case, I have added the Office 365 Security Group to the standard SharePoint Site Visitors Group.
- As you can see in the above screenshot, when you are typing the name of the Office 365 Security Group you also see a tooltip with the Group details. To check the Group has been successfully added to the SharePoint Visitors Group, just navigate to the Settings page and click the People and groups link (Users and Permissions section).
- As expected, you will see the Office 365 Security Group is there.
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Finally, log into the site using the credentials of one of the members added to the Office 365 Security Group and verify that the user has only read permissions in the site.
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